Top Quotes: “Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life” — Emily Nagoski

Introduction

“About six weeks after the fertilized egg implants in the uterus, there is a wash of masculinizing hormones. The male blastocyst (a group of cells that will form the embryo) responds to this by developing its “prefab” universal genital hardware into the male configuration of penis, testicles, and scrotum. The female blastocyst does not respond to the hormone wash at all, and instead develops its prefab universal genital hardware into the default, female configuration of clitoris, ovaries, and labia.

Welcome to the wonderful world of biological homology.

Homologues are traits that have the same biological origins, though they may have different functions. Each part of the external genitalia has a homologue in the other sex. I’ve mentioned two of them already: Both male and female genitals have a round-ended, highly sensitive, multichambered organ to which blood flows during sexual arousal. On females, it’s the clitoris; on males, it’s the penis. And each has an organ that is soft, stretchy, and grows coarse hair after puberty. On females, it’s the outer lips (labia majora); on males, it’s the scrotum. These parts don’t just look superficially alike; they are developed from the equivalent fetal tissue. If you look closely at a scrotum, you’ll notice a seam running up the center — the scrotal raphe. That’s where his scrotum would have split into labia if he had developed female genitals instead.

Homology is also why both brother and sister will have nipples. Nipples on females are vital to the survival of almost all mammal species, including humans (though a handful of old mammals, such as the platypus, don’t have nipples, and instead just leak milk from their abdomens), so evolution built nipples in right at the very beginning of our fetal development. It takes less energy to just leave them there than to actively suppress them — and evolution is as lazy as it can get away with — so both males and females have nipples. Same biological origins — different functions.”

“It is your Grand Central Station of erotic sensation. Averaging just one-eighth the size of a penis yet loaded with nearly double the nerve endings, it can range in size from a barely visible pea to a fair-sized gherkin, or anywhere in between, and it’s all normal, all beautiful.

Unlike the penis, the clitoris’s only job is sensation. The penis has four jobs: sensation, penetration, ejaculation, and urination.”

“The male homologue, of the inner labia is the inner foreskin. If a penis has been circumcised, there is very often a color change midway down the shaft. That’s because the skin at the top of the shaft is actually the inner foreskin. (Because the color change is sometimes evident only after puberty, guys have asked me if something they did made the color change, but nope, that’s just how some penises look, bless them.)”

“You may or may not have a hymen — a thin membrane along the lower edge of your vaginal opening. Whether you have one or not, I guarantee that virtually everything you were taught about the hymen is wrong.

The closest thing to true is that during intercourse the hymen can be painful if it’s not used to being stretched — that’s one of a number of potential causes of pain with penetration, but it is by no means the most common. (The most common is lack of lubrication.)

But the hymen doesn’t break and stay broken forever, like some kind of freshness seal. If a hymen tears or bruises, it heals. And the size of a hymen doesn’t vary depending on whether the vagina has been penetrated. Also, it usually doesn’t bleed. Any blood with first penetration is more likely due to general vaginal tearing from lack of lubrication than to damage to the hymen.

What does change when a woman begins having the hymen stretched regularly is that it grows more flexible. And as a woman’s hormones change as she approaches the end of adolescence (around twenty-five years old), the hymen is likely to atrophy and become much less noticeable — if it was noticeable at all.

The hymen is another example of the wide variability in female genitals. Some women are born without hymens. Others have imperforate hymens (a thin but solid membrane covering all of the vaginal opening) or microperforate hymens (many tiny holes in an otherwise solid membrane). Some women have septate hymens, which feel like a strand of skin stretching across the mouth of the vagina. Some women’s hymens are durable, others are fragile. Some disappear early in adolescence, and some are still in evidence past menopause.”

“Vagina = reproductive canal

Vulva = external genitalia

Mons = area over the pubic bone where hair grows”

“Sexual Inhibition System (SIS). This is your sexual brake. “Inhibition here doesn’t mean “shyness” but rather neurological “off” signals. Research has found that there are actually two brakes, reflecting the different functions of an inhibitory system. One brake works in much the same way as the accelerator. It notices all the potential threats in the environment — everything you see, hear, smell, touch, taste, or imagine — and sends signals saying, “Turn off!” It’s like the foot brake in a car, responding to stimuli in the moment. Just as the accelerator scans the environment for turn-ons, the brake scans for anything your brain interprets as a good reason not to be aroused right now — risk of STI transmission, unwanted pregnancy, social consequences, etc. And all day long it sends a steady “Turn off!” stream of “Turn off!” messages. This brake is responsible for preventing us from getting inappropriately aroused in the middle of a business meeting or at dinner with our family. It’s also the system that throws the Off switch if, say, in the middle of some nookie, your grandmother walks in the room.

The second brake is a little different. It’s more like the hand brake in a car, a chronic, low-level “No thank you” signal. If you try to drive with the hand brake on, you might be able to get where you want to go, but it’ll take longer and use a lot more gas. Where the foot brake is associated with “fear of performance consequences,” the hand brake is associated with “fear of performance failure” — like worry about not having an orgasm.”

“In a series of nine focus groups with eighty women, Cynthia Graham, Stephanie Sanders, Robin Milhausen, and Kimberly McBride cataloged women’s thoughts on things that cause them to turn on or to “keep the brakes on.” These researchers found themes that have interesting parallels with McCall and Meston’s work. Here are the themes, with a quote from the research participants to illustrate each:

• Feelings About One’s Body. “It’s much easier for me to feel aroused when I’m feeling really comfortable with myself … it’s not as easy to feel aroused when I’m not feeling good about myself and my body.”

• Concerns About Reputation. “Being single and you know, wanting to be sexual with another person and thinking ‘okay, am I going to be too much?’ or ‘am I going to be not enough?’ or what are they going to think of me because I’m doing these things?’.

• Putting on the Brakes. “I think it’s like you might have some inclinations and then you’re like, ‘wait a minute, you can’t do that; you’re in a relationship or that guy’s a loser … and all of a sudden you just [think] ‘okay, fine, forget it, I can’t. That’s a bad idea, and just walk away from it.”

• Unwanted Pregnancy/Contraception. “Unwanted pregnancy is a big turn off and if you’re with a partner who seems unconcerned about that, then it really feels like a danger.”

• Feeling Desired Versus Feeling Used by Partner. “I like it when (men caress not only, like, your body parts that get sexually aroused but just, like, your arms it feels like he’s encompassing you and appreciating your whole body.

• Feeling “Accepted” by Partner. “Even with my second husband, and we were together 16 years, he was not accepting of my sexual responses . . . I make a lot of noise or with my favorite way to orgasm, he felt left out . .. That was just the beginning of just really shutting down”

• Style of Approach/Initiation and Timing. “His ‘game’ you know, how the man approached you, how did he get me to talk to him longer than like, five minutes?.. It’s the ways he went about it.”

• Negative Mood. “If you’re very upset with your intended sexual partner, if you’re very upset with him about something, there’s no way that you are going to be aroused””

Context

“Context is made of two things: the circumstances of the present moment — who you’re with, where you are, whether the situation is novel or familiar, risky or safe, etc. — and your brain state in the present moment — whether you’re relaxed or stressed, trusting or not, loving or not, right now, in this moment. The evidence is mounting that women’s sexual response is more sensitive than men’s to context, including mood and relationship factors, and women vary more from each other in how much such factors influence their sexual response.

So this chapter is about context: how your external circumstances and your internal brain state can influence your sexual responsiveness.

We’ll start with the idea that your experience or perception of all kinds of sensations varies, depending on a number of factors, including external circumstances, mood, trust, and life history. Then we’ll get deep into the nitty-gritty of why this is true and unchangeable: When your brain is in a stressed state, almost everything is perceived as a potential threat.”

“Suppose you’re flirting with a certain special someone, and they start tickling you. You can imagine some situations where that’s fun, right? Flirtatious. Potentially leading to some nookie. Now imagine that you are feeling annoyed with that same special someone and they try to tickle you It feels irritating, right? Like maybe you’d want to punch that person in the face.

It’s the same sensation, but because the context is different, your perception of that sensation is different.

It’s true for all our sensory domains. A smell that seems pleasant when it’s labeled “cheese” smells gross when it is labeled “body odor.” Same smell + different context = different perception. Mood changes your perception of taste, too: feeling sad, as you do at the end of a weepy movie, reduces your ability to taste fat in food.”

“These changes in perception are not “just in your head.” People who are given a drug that will relax them and are told, “This is a drug that will relax you, not only feel more relaxed compared to those who got the drug but not the information, they also have more of the drug in their blood plasma. Context changes more than how you feel; it can change your blood chemistry.”

“Physical activity is the single most efficient strategy for completing the stress response cycle and recalibrating your central nervous system into a calm state. When people say, “Exercise is good for stress,” that is for realsie real.

Here are some other things that science says can genuinely help us not only “feel better” but actually facilitate the completion of the stress response cycle: sleep; affection (more on that in the next section); any form of meditation, including mindfulness, yoga, tai chi, body scans, etc.; and allowing yourself a good old cry or primal scream.”

“Art, used in the same way, can help. When mental health professionals suggest journaling or other expressive self-care, they don’t mean that the construction of sentences or the task of drawing is inherently therapeutic; rather, they’re encouraging you to find positive contexts to discharge your stress, through the creative process.

I’m inclined to add grooming and other body self-care to the list. Though I’m not familiar with any specific research on it, I’ve talked with lots of women for whom showering and the rituals, part social, part meditative, of painting their nails or doing their hair or putting on makeup — generally “getting ready” to go out (or stay in) — fully transition them from a stressed-out state of mind to a warm, social state of mind.”

“One day, Jessica is masturbating in her room at naptime, when her adult caregiver walks in and sees her with her hand down her pants. The parent recoils in an involuntary disgust response, and says, “Stop that!”

On that same day, in a different home, Theresa is also masturbating, and her adult caregiver also walks in and sees her with her hand down her pants. But that parent says calmly, “We’re leaving for your aunt’s house in a few minutes. Get your shoes on.”

Jessica’s brain learns to associate the shame and distress (brakes) communicated by her parent with whatever sexual arousal (accelerator) she was feeling at the moment her parent scolded her.

Theresa’s brain, by contrast, learns no such association. She was interrupted but not shut down — her accelerator deactivated, but without necessarily hitting the brake.

This one incident may not have any lasting impact. If there are no other incidents to reinforce this one, the association in Jessica’s brain will be decoupled.

Now twenty years have passed, and Jessica and Theresa’s life experiences have routinely reinforced these patterns. Jessica’s brain has learned to associate sexual arousal with stress, shame, disgust, and guilt. Theresa’s has learned to associate sexual arousal with pleasure, confidence, joy, and satisfaction.

Which of them has a better sex life?

Jessica will feel conflicted about her sexual sensations — they’re pleasurable and they’re not, at the same time. And she won’t have a clear idea why she feels guilty, ashamed, depressed, or even physical pain when she’s sexually aroused.

If a girl has a particularly sensitive brake system, one incident might be enough to create a tangled knot in her arousal process. For many women, though, it takes consistent reinforcement of a negative message in order for it to be embedded in sexual response, and consistent reinforcement takes a sex-negative culture.

In other words, it happens all the time.”

“Sex educators and sex therapists go through an educational process of intensive exposure, deliberately designed to minimize our own judgment, shame, and disgust reactions, so that we can respond with open neutrality to whatever students or clients bring into the room. This training often takes the form of a Sexual Attitude Reassessment, a multiday training that includes values clarification exercises, guest panels and speakers, plus (in my experience) a range of porn that would surprise most people in its variety, intensity, and creativity, followed by reflection and processing of our reactions to all of it.

Unless you become a sex educator, you never need to go through a process like this. All you ever need to do is begin to recognize where your learned disgust response is interfering with your own sexual pleasure, and decide whether it’s something you’d rather let go of. Your genitals and your partners’, your genital fluids and your partners’, your skin and sweat and the fragrances of your body, these are all healthy and beautiful — not to mention normal — elements of human sexual experience. You get to choose whether you feel grossed out by them.

The research tells us that disgust, as a learned response to sex, impairs women’s sexual functioning and is especially associated with sexual pain disorders.

In the next section, I’ll describe three strategies for making your own choices about what is or isn’t disgusting — they’re the same strategies you use to make your own choices about self-criticism. But the first step is to begin to notice when you experience an involuntary withdrawal from sex-related things, and try on the possibility that the sight, the smells, the sounds, the stickiness of your own sexual organism are glorious and beautiful parts of being a human being.”

“Exposure to media that reinforces body self-criticism increases body dissatisfaction, negative mood, low self-esteem, and even disordered eating. This is perhaps most clearly illustrated by a multiyear study of the impact of Western media — especially television — on young women in Fiji. In a culture where there had been “a clear preference for a robust form,,” after three years of exposure to late 1990s American television (think Melrose Place and Beverly Hills 90210), rates of disordered eating among teenage girls rose from 13 percent to 29 percent, with 74 percent reporting that they “feel too big or too fat,” in sharp contrast to pre-TV culture. And this wasn’t just a blip — ten years later, rates of disordered eating still hovered around 25–30 percent.”

Genital and Emotional Response

“For whatever reason — cultural, biological, or both (probably both) — women have more overlap between their facial expressions (Emotion I) and their subjective experience (Emotion III), while men have more overlap between their skin conductance (Emotion I) and their subjective experience (Emotion III). What this research suggests is that a woman’s emotional experience is more likely to line up with her facial expression and her vocal inflection, while a man’s emotional experience is more likely to line up with his heart rate and blood flow.”

“Genital response is not desire; response isn’t even pleasure. It is simply response. For everyone, regardless of their genitals. Just because a male body responds to a particular idea or sight or story doesn’t mean that he necessarily likes it or wants it. It just means it activated the relevant pathways — expecting.

“This is a restaurant” (Remember: Men’s 50 percent overlap between genital response and arousal is highly statistically significant …but it’s still just 50 percent.)

Sometimes guys notice their bodies responding to something even when their brains are saying, “That’s not okay.” And they feel conflicted, because on the one hand it’s clearly sexual, but on the other hand it’s Seriously Not Okay. I’ll give you an example (and feel free to skip the next two paragraphs if you’re triggered by sexual-assault-related things).

When I was in college, I was hanging out with a group of guy friends, and one of them — I’ll call him Paul — told a story about a buddy of his. At the end of a party, when there were people sleeping or passed out all over the house, Paul found his buddy having sex with a girl who was passed out drunk, unresponsive, and clearly unaware of what was happening. I say “having sex with,” but the technical term is “raping” And the buddy says, “Hey, you want to try this?” And my friend telling the story says, “Nah. We gotta go.”

The reason that’s all he said, Paul told us, rather than, “What are you doing, you douchebag? Get the hell away from her,” was that he felt torn between his gut instinct that what his friend was doing was Seriously Not Okay and the automatic reaction of his body to the sight of sexual intercourse. He got an erection. He was horrified at himself, at the idea that any part of him might interpret this Seriously Not Okay situation as erotic.

Back when I heard this story, I had no idea what was going on. Genital response was arousal, I thought. It was similar to my other friend’s story about being wet even though she was bored — though in this case, the guy was not bored but actively horrified!

What was going on?

What was going on was expecting without either eagerness or enjoying. His body recognized the sight before him as sexually relevant and, either because he was disinhibited by alcohol or else was just a low-brakes kind of guy, his brakes did not prevent his body from responding to the sexually relevant stimulation.

“This is a restaurant,” his penis told him, even though there was a brawl happening.

Let’s imagine a different story, in a world where everyone knows about nonconcordance.

Because Paul knows that what his genitals are doing indicates only what’s sexually relevant, not what’s sexually appealing, not only does he not feel ashamed of himself or wonder if he, too, might be a rapist, but the absence of all that shame creates space in his brain for doing something more proactive to intervene!

He can tell his friend to stop because what he’s doing is an act of violence, a crime. Or he can call the cops and have the friend arrested, and he can take the girl to the emergency room to have evidence collected, HIV prophylaxis administered, and emergency contraception offered. Or at the very, very least he can find a friend to help her. He can be a hero.

Genital response doesn’t mean anything but sexually relevant — expecting, essentially a conditioned reflex — not enjoying. It doesn’t indicate desire or pleasure or anything else. And by carving out space, once and for all, for nonconcordance, we’re actually making the world a better place for everyone.”

“At most, blood flow to the genitals often — not always — is simply information about whether they have been exposed to something that their brain interpreted as sexually relevant — with no information about whether they liked it.”

“General response is specific to sexually relevant stimuli — regardless of whether those stimuli are sexually appealing.

The genitals tell you, “That’s sexually relevant.”

The person tells you, “That turns me on” or “I’m enjoying this” or “I’m eager for more please.”

For women, there’s about a 10% overlap between sexually relevant and sexually appealing. For men it’s about 50%.”

“The standard narrative of sexual desire is that it just appears — you’re sitting at lunch or walking down the street, maybe you see a sexy person or think a sexy thought, and pow! you’re saying to yourself, “I would like some sex!” This is how it works for maybe 75 percent of men and 15 percent of women. That’s Olivia. That’s “spontaneous” desire.

But some people find that they begin to want sex only after sexy things are already happening. And they’re normal. They don’t have “low” desire, they don’t suffer from any ailment, and they don’t long to initiate but feel like they’re not allowed to. Their bodies just need some more compelling reason than, “That’s an attractive person right there” to want sex. They are sexually satisfied and in healthy relationships, which means that lack of spontaneous desire for sex is not, in itself, dysfunctional or problematic! Let me repeat: Responsive desire is normal and healthy. And it’s how roughly 5 percent of men and 30 percent of women experience desire. That’s Camilla. Only about 6 percent of women lack both spontaneous and responsive desire.”

Context

“We’ll start with where desire comes from: Desire is arousal in context. And then we’ll talk about what desire is not — it’s not a drive, not a “hunger” — and why that matters so much. Which will bring us to the surprising truth about what desire is: It’s curiosity. When we understand how curiosity works, we’ll also understand why sex sometimes feels like a drive, even though it never is. We’ll spend some time talking about what’s unlikely to cause desire problems — hormones and monogamy — and what is much more likely to cause desire problems — sex-negative culture and the chasing dynamic.”

“Henry didn’t give me a chance to answer — this was important for him, the solution to his turn-Camilla-on-when-she-doesn’t-yet-want-sex conundrum. “You’re saying we just have different thresholds, is that right?”

“Right.”

For Henry, sometimes just seeing Camilla walking around after a shower was all the arousal it took to activate desire. He said, “And I like that. I like seeing her walking around all damp and naked. I wouldn’t want her to stop doing it just because I wasn’t turned on before I saw her. So… if the equivalent is true for you” — he turned to Camilla — “I don’t have to feel uncomfortable creating equivalent contexts for you, right?”

“I want you to!” said Camilla.

“Tease my ticking pilot light. Build up the water pressure.”

So that’s what they decided to do. Henry turned everything into low-key, no-pressure, zero-expectation foreplay, the way her walking around after a shower was a kind of low-level foreplay for him. Cuddling and touching. Slow kisses. Flowers. Affectionate attention. Like when they were first falling in love — a constant, steady stream of reminders that, “This guy is amazing!””

“There is no baseline to return to and no physical damage that results from not “feeding” your sexual desire.

Instead, sex is an “incentive motivation system.”

Most people associate the word “incentive” with the idea of a prize, something worth working for. The biological meaning is similar. Instead of feeling pushed by an uncomfortable internal experience, like hunger, incentive motivation systems are all about being pulled by an attractive external stimulus.

When you hear “incentive motivation,” think “thrive!”

Drive > survive. Pushed by an unpleasant internal state, which ends when you return to baseline.

Incentive > thrive. Pulled by an attractive external stimulus (the incentive). It ends when you’ve obtained the incentive.

In a lot of systems, such as food appetite, both mechanisms are at work, which is why we can want delicious food even when we’re not at all hungry.

But sex is not a drive.”

“When sex is conceptualized as a need, it creates an environment that fosters men’s sense of sexual entitlement. Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s book Half the Sky illustrates how the assumption that boys require outlets to “relieve their sexual frustrations” facilitates the sexual enslavement of impoverished girls. If you think of sex as a drive, like hunger or thirst, that has to be fed for survival, if you think that men in particular — with their 75 percent spontaneous desire — need to relieve their pent-up sexual energy, then you can invent justifications for any strategy a man might use to relieve himself. Because if sex is a drive, like hunger, then potential partners are like food. Or like animals to be hunted for food.

And that’s both factually incorrect and just wrong.

This matters. If we think sex is a drive, like hunger, then we might start giving it privilege it doesn’t deserve. But if, on the other hand, we treat it like the incentive motivation system it is, might not the culture change? Might the culture be less tolerant of the suffering of girls, if that suffering isn’t to feed boys’ hunger but only feeds their interest? Maybe not, I don’t know. But I do know that men’s sexual entitlement is a primary reason they sexually assault women. It seems to me that if you believe your erection means you have a “basic survival need,” then the sex-as-drive myth — combined with long-standing cultural attitudes that women aren’t allowed the same sexual agency as men — turns toxic, fast.

I know everyone has told you that sex is a drive. I know that even the newest sex research sometimes holds fast to the idea of spontaneous desire as a drive.”

“When the monitor feels that you’re making good progress — when you’re matching or exceeding the criterion velocity — she is satisfied, motivated, eager. But when the monitor feels that you’re not making enough progress, she begins to become frustrated, and she prompts you to increase your efforts to get closer to your goal. If you still aren’t making enough progress to satisfy the little monitor, she begins to get angry … and then enraged! And eventually, if you continue to fall short, at a certain point the little monitor gives up and pushes you off an emotional cliff into the “pit of despair; as the monitor becomes convinced that the goal is unattainable. You give up in hopeless desolation.

Bill Murray’s little monitor goes berserk. Boy howdy, is the world not following the rules, and nothing — not even dying! — is effective in reaching the goal. What the hell?!

When you’re continually failing to reach a sexual incentive, your little monitor grows frustrated and then angered and eventually despairing. And that’s why it sometimes feels like an unpleasant internal experience. It’s not the desire itself that feels unpleasant, it’s your criterion velocity being unsatisfied. In other words, it’s not how you feel.. it’s how you feel about how you feel.”

“Our culture absolutely teaches us to have impatient little monitors, with criterion velocities set as small as they can be, which means many of us are easily frustrated, enraged, and eventually despairing when we can’t get what we want — including sex. We can extend this, too, and notice how responsive-desire folks feel about their “lack of desire: If you feel like you should want sex, but you don’t, you’ll begin to get frustrated, and will that frustration make you more likely to want sex?

Quite the opposite.”

“Another useful skill in managing your little monitor is to work with the natural prioritization of different goals. There are all kinds of novelty and ambiguity to investigate in the world, and the monitor has only a limited amount of attention, so she has to prioritize what domains of life to pay attention to, and these domains rank themselves in order of life importance. Sexual arousal draws the monitor’s focus toward sex, prioritizes sex, only when there aren’t other, more important things for her to concentrate on, such as survival. And again, stress is a survival response — escape the lion! — so it deprioritizes sex for most people. Effectively managing the context — turning off the offs — minimizes the things that can draw the little monitor’s attention away from sex.

A third and final skill for coping with a dissatisfied monitor is to reconceptualize sexual desire from a need to the kind of system it really is: curiosity. Curiosity (or “Exploration” or “Seeking”) is, like sex, a basic biological motivational system.It fuels our innate desire to investigate novelty and resolve ambiguity. And curiosity, like sex, is deprioritized when you’re stressed. If you’re anxious or depressed, you are less curious about novelty and are more interested in being in a comfortable, familiar environment.

This won’t surprise you because you read chapter 3, and you remember the rat in the ordinary chamber, the spa chamber, and the Iggy Pop chamber. In a calm state of mind, pretty much anything will evoke curious, “What’s this?” exploration, while in a stressed state of mind, almost nothing will.

And like sex, curiosity has no baseline to which you need to return; instead it has a delightful satisfaction toward which it pulls you. No one ever died because of not managing to read the end of a mystery novel, find out why grass is green, or experience what it’s like to skydive.

What I like most about curiosity as an analogy for sex is that it means your partner is not an animal to be hunted for sustenance, but a secret keeper whose hidden depths are infinite. Sexual boredom can happen only if you’re no longer curious.”

“Much has been made in the last several years of the “unnaturalness” of monogamy and the death of erotic connection when people commit to a long-term, sexually exclusive relationship. By now you can probably anticipate my view of the subject: It’s the context that matters, and no two people are alike. Some monogamous couples create a context that sustains and enlivens desire, and some couples … don’t. It’s not that monogamy is inherently bad for desire, it’s the way people do monogamy that can kill desire. If monogamy is your preferred relationship structure, this section is for you.

There are currently two general schools of thought on strategies for sustaining desire in long-term monogamous relationships. I’m going to frame them as the Esther Perel school and the John Gottman school, though that’s just a shorthand for a much richer and more complex issue.

In Mating in Captivity, Esther Perel presents a contradiction at the core of modern relationships: the antithetical pull between the familiar versus the novel the stable versus the mysterious. We want love, which is about security and safety and stability, but we also want passion, which is about adventure and risk and novelty. Love is having. Desire is wanting. And you can want only what you don’t already have.

If the problem is that long-term love is antithetical to long-term passion, then the solution, says Perel, is to maintain autonomy, a space of eroticism inside yourself, as a way to maintain the distance necessary to allow wanting to emerge.

In terms of that little monitor in your brain, the solution is to sustain just a little bit of dissatisfaction — not enough to cross into frustration and certainly not so much that you fall off the cliff into the pit of despair, but enough to nourish your curious, “moving-toward” energy. As Perel puts it in her TEDx talk, “In desire, we want a bridge to cross.” This means intentionally adding distance that creates an edgy instability or uncertainty, a slight and enjoyable dissatisfaction.

By way of contrast, John Gottman, in The Science of Trust, says that the problem is not lack of distance and mystery but lack of deepening intimacy. From this point of view, intimate conversation, affection, and friendship are central to the erotic life of a long-term relationship. Gottman reports the findings of a study of one hundred couples, all age forty-five or older, half with good sex lives and half with poor sex lives. Those who reported that they had good sex lives, he writes, “consistently mentioned: (1) maintaining a close, connected, and trusting friendship; and (2) making sex a priority in their lives.” In other words, sustaining desire isn’t about having a bridge to cross but about building a bridge together.

“Turn toward each other’s desires,” says Gottman.

“Keep a comfortable distance, says Perel.

Are you wondering who’s right?

They both are — depending, I think, on how you conceptualize “desire.”

“Remember back in chapter 3, the distinction between eagerness and enjoying? For Perel, desire is eagerness. Wanting. Seeking. Craving. The discrepancy-reducing pursuit of a goal, to put it in romantic terms. And for Gottman and the couples in the research he cites, desire has more to do with enjoying. Holding. Savoring. Allowing. Exploring this moment together, noticing what it is like, and liking it.”

“Strategy 1: Stuff That Raises Your Heart Rate. Early in a relationship, go for heart-pumping intensity, like Romeo and Juliet doing push-ups while they recite their lines. Ride roller coasters, go on long, fast hikes together through the wilderness, watch scary movies, go to giant concerts or political rallies. If you’re a nerd like me, talk about science for hours on end. Do whatever excites you, whatever literally gets your heart beating faster. You’ll experience general arousal and your brain will notice your level of excitement, notice the person you’re with and decide, “Hey, I guess this person is really exciting!”

Strategy 2: Meaningful Challenges. To reinforce commitment and deepen connection, go for novelty and shared, meaningful challenge. Play out a lifelong sexual fantasy that you’ve always wanted to try but haven’t found the courage to explore. Turn on the lights — not to put on a show but to open your eyes and look at each other’s faces. Connect. Dive into trust in a big, risky way. Give yourselves, as a couple, something important to work toward. This is a research-based way to “advance the plot” in a relationship that is already at the “happily ever after phase.

Caveat: Neither of these strategies will work if the brakes are on!”

Orgasm

“Women just vary. Despite what you’ve learned from movies, romance novels, or porn, in reality less than a third of women are reliably orgasmic with vaginal penetration alone, while the remaining two-thirds are sometimes, rarely, or never orgasmic with penetration alone.

Yet women ask me all the time, “Why can’t I have an orgasm during intercourse?” The reason they can’t is very likely the same reason most women can’t: Intercourse is not a very effective way to stimulate the clitoris, and clitoral stimulation is the most common way to make an orgasm happen. In fact, a likely reason why women vary in how reliably they orgasm with penetration is the distance between the clitoris and the urethra. It’s essentially a matter of anatomical engineering.”

“Culture sanctions spontaneous desire as the “expected” kind of desire because that’s how men experience desire, and culture sanctions concordant arousal as the expected kind of arousal because that’s how men experience arousal but if women’s expected kind of orgasm is whatever men experience then that should be clitoral stimulation, since anatomically the clitoris is the homologue of the penis. To say that women should have orgasms from vaginal penetration is anatomically equivalent to saying that men should have orgasms from prostate or perineal stimulation.

Certainly many men can orgasm from that kind of stimulation, but we don’t judge them if they don’t, and they don’t usually wonder if they’re broken if they don’t.

So apparently, according to cultural myth, women should be just like men with concordant arousal and spontaneous desire — right up until we actually start having intercourse, and then we’re supposed to function in an exclusively female way, orgasming from a behavior that also happens to get men off very reliably. Men’s pleasure is the default pleasure.”

“In The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution, a book perhaps best described as “relentlessly precise,” feminist philosopher of science Elisabeth Lloyd analyzed forty years of research and more than twenty theories about why women have orgasms. She concluded that the theory best supported by the available evidence is that women’s orgasm is not an evolutionary adaptation. Women’s orgasm has no relationship to reproductive success, it doesn’t promote egg fertilization or prevent miscarriage, it doesn’t even “suck” sperm into the uterus-in fact, it turns out sperm is transported most efficiently through a completely unstimulated uterus!

Instead, women’s orgasms exist as a byproduct — a result of the fact that male and female genitals develop homologously. Male ejaculation, with its close tie to orgasm, is crucial to reproduction, so orgasm is embedded in male sexual hardware in the brain and genitals. As a result, orgasm is embedded in female sexual hardware, too, because: homology.”

“Practice turning off the offs. Here’s how:

The brain states that are dragging parts of your flock away from orgasm — stress, worry, spectatoring, chronically wondering if your kid is going to knock on the door, or even just literal cold feet or other physical discomfort — need to be taken seriously and have their needs met.

Be kind and gentle with each of the offs, listen to what they need in order to feel satisfied, and then satisfy them. Go back to your context worksheets: What hits your brakes? Consider the things in your environment and also your own thoughts and feelings. What context do you need in order to turn off those offs?

Most of the offs women experience have nothing to do with sex, and many of them have straightforward, pragmatic solutions.

Chronically stressed? Complete the cycle with a good cry, a brisk walk, a primal scream, or other physical release.

Give yourself a solid twenty to sixty minutes to allow the stress of the day to wind down with whatever rituals or practices help. Baths, walks, exercise, cooking, meditation, yoga, a glass of wine, whatever works.

Constantly monitoring for footsteps in the hallway? Arrange for a time when no one else is home.

Tired? Take a nap, or even just rest for twenty minutes. Squicked out by grit on the sheets? Change them! Cold feet? Put on socks! Sometimes it really is this simple.

Other offs are more complex and require longer-term solutions, such as those I addressed earlier: self-critical thoughts or other body image challenges, lack of trust in your relationship, trauma history, sexual disgust. It took decades of planting and cultivation to create the garden you currently have. It won’t change overnight. Give yourself permission to make progress gradually, and celebrate all the incremental steps between where you are now and where you’d like to be.

And the most important turnoff the offs practice of all: self-kindness. Too often women get stuck in their sexual growth because they can’t get past their belief that something “shouldn’t” hit their brakes. It shouldn’t turn them off to have the lights on, they shouldn’t be so hung up about their bodies. “Should” is all about what you’re “doing wrong”

Pop quiz: Does a belief that you’re Doing Something Wrong with sex hit the accelerator . .. or the brake?

Yeah.

So when something hits the brake, what do you do? You take it seriously. Listen to it. Be gentle with it, like a sleepy hedgehog. Even if you wish something like having the lights on didn’t hit your brakes, the fact is it might, and that’s okay. It’s also okay to wish it didn’t. But believing it shouldn’t only hits the brakes more. Recognizing that frees you up to do something about it.”

Conclusion

“How you feel about your sexuality is more important than your sexuality itself.

Not what you think about it, not what you believe about it, not what you’ve been told about it, not what it’s like, what you do, or even what choices you make — all of those are influenced by how you feel about it, but it’s the “how you feel “how you feel about it” part that’s the key.”

“The best meta-emotion predictor of wellbeing is a variable known as “nonjudge.”

People who score low on nonjudge agree with statements like, “I tell myself that I shouldn’t be thinking the way I’m thinking” and “When I have distressing thoughts or images, I judge myself as good or bad, depending on what the thought/image is about.” People who are high on nonjudging say the opposite: When they have distressing thoughts, they simply recognize that that’s what’s happening, without judging themselves as good or bad, right or wrong. In other words, nonjudging allows you to feel what you feel, whether or not it makes sense to you, whether or not it’s comfortable, whether or not it’s what you believe you should be feeling. Nonjudging is neutrally noticing your own internal states.”

“Research participants who were less affected by their symptoms did not experience lower frequency or severity of symptoms, nor were they more aware of their internal state — the “observe” factor. Nope. The people who were less impacted by their symptoms were those who were more nonjudging! In other words, it isn’t the symptoms that predict how much anxiety disrupts a person’s life, it’s how a person feels about those symptoms. It’s not how you feel — it’s not even being aware of how you feel. It’s how you feel about how you feel. And people who feel nonjudging about their feelings do better.”

“Emotion coaching teaches you that

• You can recognize lower-intensity emotions so that you can manage them before they escalate.

• Negative emotions are a natural response to negative life events. Because negative life events are sometimes inevitable, so are negative emotions.

• Because negative emotions are a normal part of life, they are discussed, given names, and empathized with.

• “It’s normal that sometimes it feels hard.” “When you feel bad, we love you just as much as when you feel good” and “You cry all you need to, honey.”

• Your sadness, anger, and fear are signs of being human.

Emotion dismissing, on the other hand, teaches you that:

• You should ignore subtle or lower-intensity emotions — they’re irrelevant.

• Negative emotions are toxic, dangerous to yourself and the people around you.

• Negative feelings are a choice, something you could select in the morning like part of your outfit. Because they’re a choice, negative emotions may be punished — even if there is no overt misbehavior.

• “Get over it,” “Be grateful for all the good things, or “C’mon, give me a smile, honey!” Your sadness, anger, and fear are signs of failure — either your own or your family’s.”

“I was talking about the nonjudgment research with my colleague Jan, and she told me she’d had a relevant experience over the weekend. She had noticed herself getting disproportionately enraged about a small thing — losing a stamp when she was trying to mail a letter — and she later made the connection that her anger wasn’t really about the stamp. The anger had been activated the night before, when she watched a movie about a misogynist jerk, which triggered her own history with a misogynist jerk from two decades ago.

“So what did you do with the anger?” I asked.

“I told myself I didn’t need to feel angry, because the jerk is gone from my life now.”

“You judged? You hit the brakes?”

“What else was I supposed to do? Be mad at a guy I haven’t seen in twenty years?”

The threat — the misogynist jerk — wasn’t around anymore to fight against or run away from.. and yet she still had these feelings. So what could she do with them?

She could complete the cycle. The Feels exist in her body, without reference to the jerk whom she successfully left behind.

But this is not the habit most of us learn early in our lives, and it takes practice. When we have feelings we can’t really do anything about and we don’t know how to let ourselves simply feel without doing anything, our brains will look for some situation it can do something about, and it will try to impose the feelings on that situation.

So don’t be mad at the guy who’s long gone. Just allow the anger to move through you. It doesn’t matter what it’s about, it’s just random Feels, left over from the past, that have to work themselves out. Don’t hit the gas pedal, but don’t hit the brake either. Notice the anger and allow it. Be still, and it will blow through you like a hot desert wind or a typhoon.”

“Witnessing your partner’s Feels may feel uncomfortable for you; it may activate your desire to Make Your Partner Feel Better or Fix the Problem. That’s normal, that’s okay. Remember that the way to make someone feel better and fix the problem is to allow the person to move all the way through the tunnel, complete the cycle. This is not a stimulus-response kind of problem — like “IF Partner Is Crying, THEN Cheer Partner Up Instantly!” No. If your partner is crying or otherwise having an intense emotional experience, remember it’s their sleepy hedgehog, and your job is to listen for what the hedgehog needs while allowing your partner to complete the cycle. Being afraid of feelings or being angry about them — your own or your partner’s — only increases the fear and anger in your relationship, which makes your sex life worse. Being nonjudging about the feelings creates a space where your partner can complete the cycle and thus get the heck out of the way of your confidence, jov, and ecstasy.”

“Realistic expectations can make all the difference — for instance, it’s normal for it to take six months to a year for a couple to get pregnant, and 15 percent of couples don’t conceive within that first year. Adjusting your expectations about how effortful it will be frees you to enjoy the sex you’re having.”